WARNING EXPLICIT CONTENT The raw courage of Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd was laid bare in a courtroom Tuesday. It was like a painting appearing magically from beneath the layer of dried blood and personal filth Russell Williams applied to them as they approached death.

I know it's a failure to describe them in such a passive way — my God, they were living women, not works of art — but I don't know how else to tell readers that one truly bright thing did emerge from what they endured. It was their sheer drive to live.

I see Comeau and Lloyd as heroines from another age in light medieval blues and rich golds. Colours cheer me, and besides, it's my only comfort. Indulge me, it's all I've got on this awful day in a plain room in an ordinary town filled with good people who have just heard the unimaginable.

For everything about Williams is dark and disgusting, from the black zip ties he used to tie them up to the grey duct tape that silenced them to the dark cloth that covered Comeau's eyes to the grey blanket that wrapped Lloyd's corpse.

The two women were, in profoundly different ways, both brave, and I know their families and friends must take pride in that.

Up to that point, Williams had been a pathetic panty thief and haunter of little girls. Panties don't talk back. They're mere containers for the living female that inhabits them. Williams later told police that underwear had been his fetish since his 20s, which shows the extraordinary power of a minor brain pattern. He was hopeless with girls. The evidence of his rapes shows that he didn't know how to talk to a victim, and there was even a strange, awkward politeness.

That was gone by the time he entered Comeau's basement.

Comeau fought him savagely from start to finish. At 37, she was a strong woman and she had good, fast instincts when the whole terrifying Stephen King scenario erupted in her basement on that winter night. She was home alone — Williams, as her boss, knew her address and her schedule — and she was looking for her wandering cat. She went downstairs, into her basement, where Williams was hiding behind the furnace. Her cat had found him and was sitting, staring. Comeau saw Williams there.

A violent massive protracted fight erupted. “Bastard,” was Comeau's first word. She didn't recognize him because his face was covered, but she knew what was up. He tore her scalp open, beating her on the head with a red metal flashlight, chased her and tied her to a metal pole, a large bolt piercing her back. When he dragged her upstairs, she struggled ferociously.

We know minute by minute how the battle went because he filmed and photographed it. Her words were, “No.”

“Get out. I want you to leave,” she said.

She was blinded and gagged by a towel and tape, but even after he raped her repeatedly, her fingers were still plucking at the rope that tied her arms, trying to wiggle out. In one amazing attempt to live, she threw her bound body off the bed and fled into the ensuite bathroom, smashing a picture on the wall.

“Leave me alone,” she screamed. When he put a pillow over her face, she wriggled out from under it.

Her eyes were hemorrhaging from pressure on her jugular, and she knew at that point that her last card was an appeal to his humanity. “I don't deserve to die. I've been good all my life.” And then, “I want to live so badly. Give me a chance.”

And he took his hands and deliberately placed duct tape over her nose. At 3:30 in the morning, she suffocated. It's on film. It's in photos.

At this point we're in awe of her — that she managed to survive so long, that she never gave up. She was noble, she was strong, and we wouldn't have loved her any less if she had simply melted in fear. But she didn't and she died.

Jessica Lloyd was 27 and full of fire, as you can see from her photo. She was planning a vacation to Cuba, she was good at her job, she had a loving family and tons of friends. Her house was on a huge lot on the highway. He claims to have seen her as he drove past on the highway. She was on her treadmill, getting fighting fit.

He watched her turn out her bedroom light that night, but she woke up before he could hit her on the head. What followed was a day and a half of unimaginable torment.

Williams' video shows her lying on the bed, arms bound behind her and tied to the headboard, zip ties attached to her neck for control purposes and her eyes covered. She is “fully compliant,” as the Crown attorney puts it. “She helps him and doesn't want to upset him.”

Lloyd has made her decision: she will fight the long battle. Obedience might save her.

The chronicle that follows shows her bravery, self-control and what her family believes to be a survival plan.

“You want to survive this, don't you?” he says to her softly.

And he does things to her that cause terrible pain and complete humiliation, but she has an iron will to live and endurance just might carry her through.

Lloyd is raped so many times that I lose count in my notes. She is near strangulation from the plastic zip tie around her neck that he uses as a leash.

And she never loses her self-control. She is careful and apologizes for not following his orders correctly. She gets in the shower, tied and blinded, and is soaped and rinsed by him, and even though she says she is cold, she does not complain when she is left wet and naked, standing in the bathroom.

And then she begins shuddering and convulsing. She appears to have a seizure and tells him, “I should have told you this last night. I'm sorry.” Her family believes she was pretending to have epilepsy. “If I die,” she asks him, “will you make sure my mom knows I love her?”

She knew then that she would die. She fights on, with her endurance and her performance, if it is indeed a performance and not a physical collapse induced by sheer terror. Worse ensues.

Williams has no pity. A small, cold, shuddering human being is calling out to her mother and begging for mercy and there isn't going to be any and she knows it, but Jessica Lloyd keeps going. In her last minutes —and it's all on film — at 7:50 and I can't tell if it's a.m. or p.m. because my tears blur my notes at this point, “she is broadly smiling.”

She has been in his house for what feels like decades of pain, she knows she will die, she is in infinite duress and he tells her to pose and look happy and she does.

She smiles for him.

Shortly after, she is standing up. He hits her on the head with the flashlight. He strangles her with a rope.

She is gone.

I don't want the last image of her to be her bound body in the fetal position, wrapped in a grey blanket and dumped behind black rocks in the snowy woods, but it is.

She looks like a rock herself, a form placed on the ground as if she was of no significance, as if she had suffered death by landscape.

Comeau decided to fight and she fought like nature, red in tooth and claw. Lloyd tried to use brain and heart. They were useless against a creature like the man who sat in court Tuesday, but they were all they had.

And I am out of breath and out of tears.

There's a portrait in my head of these two women. It's not like their killer's modern stream of digital porn, but something vivid and timeless, painted on warm stone, like a fresco. I am so grateful to them — is it their afterimage? — for showing me how to attempt to withstand the force of pure, woven, acidic, long-nurtured cruelty. They didn't win, but they did win, if you know what I mean.

I know that you do.

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